On February the 19th another important milestone has been reached on the road to the Jaunty Jackalope: Feature Freeze. The Ubuntu Developers are now focusing on fixing bugs to produce a rock solid release by then end of April 2009. Here are some highlights from the Ubuntu Server team:

Ubuntu in the cloud

The long-awaited Eucalyptus package made it to the archive just before Feature Freeze paving the way for easy deployment of a cloud infrastructure built upon Ubuntu Server. In its wake a handful of java related components have also become available from the archive:

Apache Axis2 is a Web services engine implemented in C which can be used to provide and consume WebServices. Both SOAP and REST style webservice are supported with binary data being exchanged via MTOM.

The WS-Security specification is provided by the rampart package, the Apache web services security engine.

Other virtualization related components have also been updated:

kvm: the new upstream release ships with an updated version of qemu as well as loads of bugfixes. Nested svm is also available in Jaunty – now you can run kvm in kvm in kvm…

libvirt 0.6.0 brings in improved support for daemon restart as well as copy-on-write storage volume support.

virt-manager 0.6.1 supports remote storage management and provisioning, remote VM installation and VM migration. Avahi is also used to detect existing libvirt systems available on the local network.

opennebula has been updated to version 1.2. Cloning and transferring vms is easier thanks to the new Image Management feature. Networking has also been improved.

Samba 3.3.0

The latest version of samba 3 has been uploaded to Jaunty. In the area of file serving it brings extended cluster support as well as new experimental VFS modules to store NTFS ACLs on Samba file servers. On the Winbind front two new idmap backends have been added (adex and hash) as well as support for user and group aliasing. The idmap_ad backend now supports multiple domains.

AppArmor profiles

Jamie Strandbodge has been working on new AppArmor profiles. Both dhcp and tcpdump packages have seen the addition of a profile: dhcp-client is now protected by AppArmor.

Encrypted swap

Dustin Kirkland added a script to the ecryptfs-utils to help configuring systems to use an encrypted swap.

Directory services

Mathias Gug uploaded a new version of openldap. Better support for GnuTLS as well as a transition to libdb 4.7 are available from the jaunty archive.

libdb transition

Scott Kitterman and other developers spent quite some time updating packages to use the newest versions of libdb. 4.2 is almost gone now that openldap has been updated to use 4.7. Other versions are also on their way out with dspam, awffull and ggcov being built with the latest version of libdb.

/etc under revision control

Thierry Carrez has been busy merging new versions from Debian. A daily cron job has been added that will commit any changes to /etc to the local tree, bzr being the default vcs used in Ubuntu.

Boot from multipathed devices

Timo Aaltonen updated grub to support booting from multipathed devices.

krb5 and Microsoft kerberos implementation

Phoronix test suite

Dustin Kirkland worked with Michael Owens to make the phoronix test suite available in Ubuntu. This automated suite is able to test and benchmark different parts of a Linux OS.

New django applications

As the popularity of django is rising so is the number of django applications available from the Ubuntu archive: python-django-tagging, python-django-evolution, python-django-djblets and python-django-debug-toolbar are now available in Jaunty.

AMQP support

AMQP, the emerging standard for high performance enterprise messaging, is now easily available in Ubuntu with the addition of rabbitmq-server to the archive. Written in the erlang language and based on the Open Telecom Platform rabbitmq features a complete, conformant and interoperable implementation of the published AMQP specification.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 5:33 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.
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